Galgotias University apologises for ‘confusion’, not for false claim

Galgotias University apologised on Wednesday, 18 February after it invited international ridicule for claiming to have developed a robotic dog, patented by a Chinese startup and bought online. The private university was ordered to vacate the hall allotted to it at Bharat Mandapam where the AI Impact Summit is being held in New Delhi; and when university representatives denied having received any such instruction, electric supply to the pavilion was cut off.

During the day, the university continued to blame the media for misrepresenting the situation. “My 6 can be your 9,” explained Prof. Neha Singh, blaming the media for not following what she had said the previous day. Incidentally, she had said on DD News that the robotic dog was developed at the university’s centre of excellence.

On Wednesday she claimed that she may not have been heard or understood properly. “Listening is an art,” she told an interviewer while admitting that she may not have expressed herself well, which, she smugly added, was "rare".

A news agency quoted her as saying, “By one misinterpretation, the internet has gone by storm. It might be that I could not convey well what I had wanted to say, or you could not understand well what I wanted to say. I am a faculty member in communications at the School of Management, not in AI. Only you (the media) have heard what the government has said, as far as I know we are here at the expo. As a university, we are standing tall. The robot was brought here only for projection....".

What made it worse was that the university had claimed that other robots and drones, all of which are commercially available on the Internet, were also 'engineered’ by its students.

Late on Wednesday afternoon, the registrar of Galgotias University, N.K. Gaur, issued a ‘press statement’ and an apology, but not for the false claims it had made in press statements, promotional videos and at the pavilion. Instead, the university apologised for the ‘confusion’ in communication caused by an ‘ill-informed’ member of staff. The reference clearly was to the lady who, the statement added, was not aware of the technical details and the origin of the robotic dog.

Throwing the staff member under the bus, the registrar blamed her "enthusiasm for being on camera" for the fiasco. She, declared the registrar, was not authorised to speak to the press.

The Galgotias University, as reported earlier, is closely linked to the BJP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had personally handed over an award to the university as the ‘best private university’ way back in 2014 soon after taking over as prime minister. BJP MP and spokesperson Sambit Patra has delivered a convocation address at the university, and Union ministers have been frequent visitors as guests at different functions.

Allegations also surfaced during the day about the university filing over a thousand patents to claim incentive money from the government. It was alleged that the government pays Rs 5 lakh for every patent filed, and that several private universities in the NCR region and Chandigarh and Punjab have been taking advantage of the incentive.

All the IITs taken together, it was pointed out, had filed barely 800 patent applications, while each of these private universities have filed over a thousand. The Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru is said to have filed a few hundred. Both IITs and the IISc have been granted many more patents compared to private universities, strengthening the suspicion that the latter are part of the ‘patent racket’.